Watching Is Work

The servant who ends up with the hypocrites never calls his master a fraud. He says something far more ordinary. “My master is delayed” (Matthew 24:48). He still expects the man to come home. He has simply pushed the arrival far enough out that it no longer governs what he does on a Tuesday. Saint Thomas Aquinas puts his finger on that sentence and refuses to move on. The cause of the crime, he says, is despair of the coming, and then he adds four words that carry the whole parable: this is the root of it all.¹ Everything ugly in the story grows out of a private guess about timing.

Most of us have made that guess. Almost nobody reading this has decided that judgment is a fiction. We just keep moving the date. Conversion later, the confession line later, the apology to the person we wronged later, the prayer we quietly gave up on because heaven seemed slow about it. And the correction Christ offers is not a warning to sit still and stare at the horizon. It is an order to get to work. Today the Church celebrates Saint Monica, who spent 16 years handling exactly this temptation and never once gave in to it.

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sos′thenes,

To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge, even as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ; who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Gospel: Matthew 24:42-51

Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

“Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master when he comes will find so doing. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that wicked servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed,’ and begins to beat his fellow servants, and eats and drinks with the drunken, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will punish him, and put him with the hypocrites; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.”

Scriptural Analysis

Paul is opening a letter to the worst-behaved community he ever founded. Sixteen chapters of trouble sit in front of him: factions behind Paul, Apollos, and Cephas; a man living with his father’s wife; believers hauling each other into pagan courts; drunkenness at the Lord’s Supper. He has the standing to open with a rebuke, and he calls himself an apostle in the first line precisely to establish it. Then he mostly declines to use it, preferring to move the Corinthians by reminding them of the graces they were given.²

Then Paul strikes the note the whole letter is tuned to. They “have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1 Corinthians 1:2). Sanctified means consecrated, set apart for a divine purpose, the way a chalice or a church building is consecrated. He is not calling the Corinthians saints in the sense of finished, heroic holiness. He is naming the radical consecration of their baptism, and in his mind that consecration is a real change in what they are, which then demands a corresponding change in what they do. Action follows being, as the philosophers put it.² That single move is Paul’s whole method of correction. He tells them what Baptism made them, then spends 16 chapters asking them to behave accordingly.

The thanksgiving that follows is worth reading for what it leaves out. Writing to the Thessalonians, Paul thanked God for their faith, their love, and their hope. Writing to Corinth, he thanks God only for the charismatic gifts. He finds their faith poorly formed and their love badly lacking, so he gives thanks for what is honestly there, which happens to be the thing the Corinthians prize most, and by doing so readies their hearts for everything coming next.² Generous and completely honest at the same time. He also tells them, gently, that they have not arrived: a community loaded with charisms is not one for whom the day of the Lord has already dawned, and the growth still ahead will be more the Lord’s work than their own effort.²

Then the vocabulary turns legal. God “will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:8). Behind “sustain” is bebaiōsei, a verb carrying the sense of a claim verified and established. Behind “guiltless” is anegklētous, a word Paul uses only here, lifted straight from the law courts: those against whom no charge has been entered.³ Paul is picturing the last judgment as a hearing at which the Corinthians stand with nothing filed against them. And the day he names is the day the prophets named, the day of the Lord that Amos said would be darkness and Joel said would be salvation, now identified without hesitation as the day of Jesus Christ.³

Which raises the obvious question of how a church like that one survives such a day. Paul answers in three words: “God is faithful” (1 Corinthians 1:9). The Greek has no verb at all, just pistos ho Theos, and the adjective reaches back to the Hebrew root behind God’s covenant fidelity, the reliability Israel confessed in Deuteronomy and Isaiah and the Psalms.³ The one doing the sustaining is God. What they are sustained into is koinōnia, fellowship with the Son, which runs vertically into Christ and horizontally into every other believer, so the gifts they are so proud of turn out to have been issued for the common good.²

The Gospel takes that same day and asks what to do between now and then. Aquinas sets out the shape before touching a word of it: having established that the hour is uncertain, the Lord warns to vigilance, first all men, then prelates in particular.¹ That first warning lands on everyone, and it is easy to hurry past on the way to the parable about clergy.

Because the hour is hidden, Aquinas says, no one can rest confident on the strength of his present state. Jerome had already read the concealment as deliberate: the Lord left the end uncertain so that man would always be awaiting it. Then Aquinas asks what sleep actually is, finds three failures in it, and sets a form of watching against each. A sleeper’s senses go idle, so watch by lifting the senses through contemplation, since “I sleep, and my heart watches” (Song of Songs 5:2). A sleeper stops moving, so watch by good works, because the man who watches is the one who exercises himself in them (1 Peter 5:8). A sleeper lies down, so watch against plain negligence, since Scripture asks how long the sluggard means to lie there (Proverbs 6:9).¹ Watching, on that reading, is labor. The point arrives from the other direction in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: the faithful servant is never praised for sitting at the window scanning the horizon, because preparedness means doing the master’s work.⁴

Aquinas raises the objection everyone eventually raises. The apostles were not going to live until the end of the world, so why tell them to watch for it? He answers with Augustine, that the Lord comes twice: at the end of the world to all men generally, and to each man at his own end in death, and the two arrivals match, since a man is found at the second as he was at the first. Augustine’s sentence is the one to keep: the last day of the world finds that man unprepared whom his own last day finds unprepared.¹ The image of the thief then gets read inward. The house is the soul, the master of the house is reason, and the thief is the pull of a false teaching or a temptation. Thieves work at night, which Aquinas takes to mean that while a man is contemplating divine things, temptation stays away, and when he carries himself carelessly, it arrives. Since we do not know the hour of the break-in, he concludes, we keep watch the whole night. Chrysostom adds the sting: men who worry about money will sit up all night guarding it, and the soul deserves more than that.¹

Then the parable narrows to the men who run the household. The household is the Church, the servants are her shepherds, and the food handed out at the proper time is the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments (1 Timothy 3:15).⁴ Aquinas asks what makes any good work good and answers that two things are needed: an intention fixed on the right end and fitting means toward it, so the office requires faithfulness and prudence together. Faithfulness governs the intention, and its opposite is the shepherd who feeds himself (Ezekiel 34:2). To explain what a faithful steward is, Aquinas reaches for Paul: “it is required among the dispensers, that a man be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2).¹ Our two readings shake hands right there, inside Aquinas’s own argument.

Prudence governs the means, and he is blunt about why it is needed. A man can seek the glory of God and go about it without knowledge, correcting a fault in such a way that he pushes someone into sin. The duty is to give the household “the food of teaching, of good example, and temporal relief,” which is why Christ told Peter three times to feed his sheep: by word, by example, by material help. And feed in season, because Christ himself withheld things his disciples could not yet carry (John 16:12). Aquinas finishes the thought without softening it. If a man insists on saying the words when the moment is wrong, he wreaks destruction.¹ A true thing said at the wrong hour does damage, and calling it honesty does not repair it.

Which brings us back to the ruined servant and his sentence about delay. Augustine hears two possible tones in it. A man might say his lord is long in coming out of longing, the way the psalmist asks when he will come and appear before the face of God (Psalm 42:3). Or he might say it from despair that the Lord is coming any time soon, the way Israel had a proverb that the days would drag on and every vision fail (Ezekiel 12:22). From that root two branches grow, one cruel and one soft: he strikes his fellow servants because he has begun to regard them as beneath him, or he wounds them by bad example, and then he sits down with the drunkards.¹

Aquinas closes with a thought experiment of Augustine’s worth carrying around. Set the wicked servant aside and picture three good ones, all of whom love the master’s coming. The first says the master will come quickly, so I will watch. The second says the master will delay, but I want to watch. The third says I do not know when he will come, and so I want to watch. Which one has it right? Augustine picks the third. The first is badly deceived, because when the quick arrival he counted on fails to happen, he is in danger of falling asleep out of boredom. The second can be wrong without being in danger. Only the third is always expecting, under uncertainty. Aquinas draws the conclusion in seven words: it is bad to settle on some time.¹ The servant who sets the date far off and the eager soul who sets it near have made the same mistake in opposite directions.

Daily Application

Monica had every excuse to settle on a time and decide it had passed. Her Christian parents married her to a pagan named Patricius with a violent temper and a wandering eye, and his mother lived under the same roof and was, by every account, difficult. Monica outlasted them both. Her prayers and her example brought her husband and her mother-in-law to Christ, and Patricius died in 371, a year after his baptism.⁵ Then came her eldest, 17 years old, brilliant, running with the Manichees and living the way you would expect a gifted young man in Carthage to live. She got a vision assuring her that Augustine would come back to the faith, and then she waited from 371 to Easter of 387 while very little visibly improved. He lied to her at the harbor, said he was seeing a friend off, and sailed for Rome without her. She followed him to Rome. He had already left for Milan. She followed him to Milan.⁵

Look at what she did with the waiting, because it is the working definition of the watchfulness Aquinas describes. She prayed and fasted for a son who did not want her nearby, which is watching by good works. She let herself be corrected, taking Ambrose as her director and giving up devotional practices that had become second nature.⁵ And she never set a date. She had no idea whether the answer was two years off or twenty, and she went on feeding her son at the proper time anyway, by word, by example, and by simply being in the same city.

That is the interior movement today’s readings ask for, and the honest inventory is not hard to take. There is probably a prayer you have quietly stopped praying because heaven took too long to answer it. A marriage you have written off. A child who has not been to Mass in a decade. A sin you keep planning to bring to confession once the season gets less busy. It is worth asking, too, who has been getting the sharp edge of your patience while you wait, because the servant’s cruelty and his indulgence both grew from the same calculation.

Monica did get to see her answer, which most of us will not. After Ambrose baptized Augustine and the family started home for Africa, she told her son that nothing in this world afforded her delight any longer, and that she did not know why she was still here, since all her hopes had been fulfilled.⁵ She fell ill and died at Ostia within days. For 16 years before that, though, she had no idea the ending was coming. She simply kept the watch under uncertainty, which Augustine says is the only way to keep it well.

And you have footing the wicked servant never had. Paul told a chaotic church in a Greek port city that God himself would hold them steady to the end and present them with no charge filed, because God is faithful. That promise covers the days when your own faithfulness runs thin. So take up the prayer you set down, do the next piece of work the Lord actually put in front of you, and keep the watch without setting a date.

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Notes

1. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, ed. The Aquinas Institute, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), ch. 24, lect. 4, nos. 1993-2009 (pp. 315-320). Aquinas cites Jerome at nos. 1994 and 2008, Augustine at nos. 1996, 2005, and 2009, Chrysostom at no. 1998, and Origen at no. 2008.
2. ↑ George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 29-35.
3. ↑ Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), on 1 Corinthians 1:6, 8-9 (pp. 63-66).
4. ↑ Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 316-317.
5. ↑ Franciscan Media, “Saint Monica,” Saint of the Day, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-monica/. Monica’s words to Augustine are preserved in his Confessions, book 9.

Books Cited

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• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute, 2013)
• George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)